Apocalypse Arms

Apocalypse Arms is a human handheld and shipboard weapons manufacturer based on Lo in the Corel system. It released its first branded munitions in 2913, after founder Dalton Colabello discovered a cache of unused designs by the deceased Messer Era engineer Juliet Maupin. Everything that Apocalypse Arms sells is explicitly based on Messer Era weaponry.

The crate

Dalton Colabello was a construction magnate whose passion for collecting antique weapons led him to buy a strange crate at a military surplus auction in Cestulus. Inside, he found prototype parts for ship weapons unlike anything he had seen before. After the auction, Colabello returned home and unsuccessfully attempted to reconstruct the weapons. Although he could not get the prototypes working, he was captivated by their design and potential power, and he became determined to identify their creator. Communications with the military warehouse turned up a single clue: the crate had been in storage since 2792, the year the Messer regime fell.

Colabello hired private investigators to chase the digital trail and took the weapons to numerous experts, hoping that one of them could provide answers. Eventually, a Messer scholar at Reis' Carey University found an archived datalog of shipments into and out of the Davien warehouse where Colabello had purchased the crate. A cross-reference against the log scored a hit: the crate had been sent there from an address in Newcastle, Magnus.

The elusive engineer

A Casaba Outlet occupied the Newcastle address. Doubting that the fashion retailer had briefly made a set of ship weapons, Colabello searched the site's 2792 property log. Records revealed that Genly Engineering Solutions had been renting the space when the crate was shipped to Cestulus. Outside of the name on the rental agreement, Genly did not seem to exist.

Years passed without further information coming to light, and requests to the government uncovered nothing. The lack of progress sank Colabello into a deep depression, and he considered selling the weapons, but his curiosity persisted. Hoping that a brute force approach would bear results, Colabello went to the Ark and checked Magnus' 2792 census by hand. After months of poring over names, he discovered one Genly Maupin. Genly had been only six years old in 2792, but he remained Colabello's best lead in years, so Colabello kept digging and found that Genly's mother was Juliet Maupin, a former Aegis Dynamics engineer.

Months later, Colabello found the great-granddaughter of Juliet Maupin living in Lo and paid her a visit. He showed her the prototypes and asked whether they might be her great-grandmother's creation. She explained that she had heard stories from her mother about awards her great-grandmother had won for her scanner designs, but nothing about weapons. She allowed Colabello to examine Juliet's old notes, and there, in an unlabeled folder, he found what he had sought for so long: Juliet's original designs for the prototypes and a journal describing their creation.

The unknown genius

Before designing the weapons that would eventually inspire Apocalypse Arms, Juliet Maupin worked as a lead engineer for Aegis Dynamics, the titan of Cestulus industry. She led the team responsible for the 2783 revamped Retaliators still coveted by bomber pilots today. Following that success, Maupin was introduced to Sylvain Evans, a high-ranking member of the UEE military. Evans enlisted Maupin for a classified project to produce a new line of powerful and advanced combat systems for the Messer government. Maupin took the opportunity to design weapons with the freedom that government funding provided.

In 2790, Linton Messer XI felt his Empire crumbling. From without, the ongoing Xi'an cold war and the emergent Vanduul threat were exacting a sustained toll, while from within, the death of Anthony Tanaka had begun to transform public dissenters from activists into operational revolutionaries. Messer XI believed his time was limited unless he created a strategic advantage in the form of more powerful weapons.

Evans provided Maupin with a high-tech lab and a capable team in a nondescript building in Newcastle. To keep their work secret, the project was given the codename Genly Engineering Solutions in honor of Maupin's young son. Building off the work she had done at Aegis, Maupin developed prototypes for a ballistic Gatling gun and a mass driver, the weapons that would eventually find their way into Colabello's crate.

In 2792, the military picked up the prototypes with the intention of shipping them to Kilian for testing. During their journey, footage of the Massacre of Garron II leaked to the public and the entire UEE military was mobilized to quell the rebellion. The crate containing the weapons was offloaded into the Cestulus warehouse and forgotten until Colabello bought it well over a century later.

After the collapse of the Messer regime, Juliet Maupin grew concerned that her association with the corrupt government would be revealed. She swore off weapon design and fled with her family to the Corel System. Maupin later went to work at a Lo engineering firm, where she developed advanced scanning machines used to detect contraband along the UEE-Banu border. Many of the scanners still in use today are based on her designs. Maupin died in 2862, never knowing that her greatest contribution to the world was still to come.

Apocalypse Arms

After unraveling the mystery, Colabello purchased the original design documents from Maupin's great-granddaughter, sold his construction business, and poured his assets into launching Apocalypse Arms. The name was inspired by a line in Maupin's journals that described her desire to build guns that could overcome any situation, even the apocalypse.

With the full designs in hand, Colabello was able to get the prototypes working, and the first line of Apocalypse Arms branded munitions reached the market in 2913. Although updated to take advantage of modern technology, most of what Maupin had conceived over a hundred years earlier remained untouched, especially the weapons' distinctive style and performance. The company's inaugural sales campaign did not shy away from saying that the guns were built for the Messers. Many found the strategy distasteful, but it proved effective. Colabello appeared on Spectrum shows to discuss the weapons' history and how the guns were kept from being used by a despot. From his perspective, Apocalypse Arms was a human success story.

The legacy of the Messers still hangs over Apocalypse Arms and has driven some to shun its products, while others associate the brand with its prevalence in conflict zones such as Nexus IV and Charon III. The guns have nonetheless built a loyal customer base on the strength of their quality and effectiveness. Using Maupin's designs as inspiration, Colabello has hired new engineers to continue expanding the company's catalog.

Source: StarCitizen.tools. Source content is shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.